


First Confluence

by maroon



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: AKA Justice, Ahzrukhal Dying, Dancing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 09:37:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17598821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maroon/pseuds/maroon
Summary: Charon didn't know it then, but the girl who stands taller than him and the boy that barely reaches her shoulder will be something akin to his family.





	First Confluence

**Author's Note:**

> four things: 
> 
> their names are Rafael Joaquín "Jo" Ramírez and Eris "Eerie" Selena Ramírez.  
> theyre twins  
> both hopelessly gay and dumb.
> 
> im skylliann on twitter and rk-1k on tumblr. talk to me if u want.

Charon has never seen anyone as tall, if not taller than him. Except maybe Super Mutants, but it would seem that the woman—this _smoothskin—_ with the shorn head and permanent scowl etched onto her face has proved him wrong. He’s been proved wrong on many accounts in his very, very long life, but this is the first time that he’s genuinely surprised that he’d been proven wrong.

The woman stands up to his height, if not an estimated inch taller, dwarfing the man beside her, who stands barely to her shoulder.

Charon deduces that they are fraternal twins—or at least, siblings; the same shade of dark, mossy eyes, the same smooth, darkened bronze shade of skin that they boast. Though the boy is all smiles, whereas the girl is frowning. Charon sees his eyes turn a shade deeper when he settles his eyes on Ahzrukhal, and the contract that binds Charon and the man _singes_ at his skin, telling him that this boy is a threat to his employer.

The woman lumbers, not unlike a tree, and definitely not unlike Charon, using her full height as she stands behind the boy, who takes a seat, raps his knuckles on the countertop, and announces two glasses of whatever’s on tap, natural like a local.

It is then that Charon wonders if the woman is this boy’s _Charon_. Or if this boy is this woman’s _Ahzrukhal_. The thought shouldn’t make him hope, but the thought if finding one like him is…

Liberating. If something like him could feel liberation.

Charon’s ears—as damaged and all but useless as they are—strain to hear whatever it is this baby-faced smoothskin is telling Ahzrukhal, whose eyes are strictly on the boy, enamoured and entranced.

Ahzrukhal tells the boy something that makes the boy laugh, tossing his long, jet-black hair over one shoulder, practiced and smooth as this facade of his.

The woman at his back only tosses back the drink and remains silent. More and more does Charon see himself in the woman’s face, as if in some world, he would be her.

She makes a small movement after a little while, when Ahzrukhal has shed his jacket, his hands braced against the countertop, fully _ensconced_ in this boy’s wiles, the sweet smile on his face—

“You should take a picture,” A smoky, deep voice says from beside him, and Charon doesn’t jump in surprise solely due to the fact it’s been trained out of him. The woman is standing beside him, her arms thick with new scars and corded muscles. He’s sure that more scars reside underneath her battle-worn armour. “It lasts longer.”

Something in him wants to retort. But something in him also quashes down that want, burning it until he could feel nothing but that cruel, constant burn. He says nothing but his usual spiel of making them talk to Ahzrukhal.

She blinks, lifting up a cigarette that he didn’t see her pull out seconds earlier, “My brother’s already talking to him.” Her voice is much like a young boy wearing his father’s suit. Ill-fitting. “You’re his, yeah?” She says with an incline of her head.

Charon doesn’t answer. Lets her chatter on. She’s got a lot to say, it seems. Charon doesn’t.

This is where he begins to divorce himself from her. She’s not like him. He hasn’t found _kin_.

The thought disappoints him more than anything in this goddamned bitch of a world has. That… surprises him.

The woman hums. “My name is Eris. That’s Jo. I think…” She pauses, pushing herself off of the wall and handing him the cigarette she hadn’t taken a drag out of but lit, his hand immediately unsticking itself from his gun and taking it, making her smile.

And by _God_ it’s an ugly smile. It’s too knowing, shows too much teeth. It’s the smile of a ghoul that’s found its latest meal. It’s too familiar. If Charon let himself remember, he remembers a trigger-happy young man with the same, ugly, proud grin.

“I think you’d do well to remember our names, Charon.” The boy by the bar stands, grinning sweetly at Ahzrukhal, him and his sibling meeting in the middle. The boy’s dark eyes seem to glow like sunlight through tree leaves when they snap towards Charon, far too innocent for the dingy little bar he is in. He is pristine where this bar isn’t.

A smile makes the boy’s mouth curl.

Charon cannot look away.

The woman grins and shakes her head, and they walk out of the Ninth Circle, bringing with them all the life that this dank little den hasn’t had ever since its conception.

Charon takes a drag off the cigarette before throwing it into the trash.

It feels like Charon is guarding a tomb once more.

* * *

Gossip makes its way through Underworld quicker than the scent of decaying bodies.

Not before long, Winthrop is sitting near the bench, talking avidly with Willow, who laughs when they exchange stories about these two funny little smoothskins, the way the smaller one all but started a fight with Cerberus’ bigoted programming, cursing to hell and back that he’ll find some way to ‘rewire the shit’ out of the Mr. Gutsy. They talk about the way the taller one picked Patchwork up and hauled him over her shoulder to take to the Chop Shop.

The way they both sat down and listened to Carol’s tale like two little children ready for bedtime. Charon listens to it all. He’s not one for gossip, but all these stories…

It makes Charon itch for a fucking cigarette.

He thinks of cigarettes. Remembers the ones he used to smoke. Red end. Marlboro Reds. He remembers someone distinctly telling him those are _lady_ cigarettes and that he shouldn’t be smoking them.

Charon remembers smoking them anyways.

Willow turns the gossip to him, with that wide, accepting, teasing, _sisterly_ smile of hers. “What do you think, Ron?”

He says nothing. He doesn’t have any thoughts about the twins that came and took Underworld by the heart.

The female ghoul shrugs, her rheumy eyes getting this faraway look. Charon thinks, that if she had eyelashes, she would bat them. “I think the tall one is dreamy.”

* * *

Soon enough, Underworld can’t get enough of the twins. They’re on everyone’s lips. Ghouls, humans, Super Mutants. They’re on the radio.

The Lone Wanderers.

Who else would it be? Three-Dog called one a gentle giant, the other a _princess_. Like they’re something out of a fairy tale. Like they’re not broken and filled with scars, like they’re not ugly and beautiful simultaneously.

Charon quickly gets tired of it. Ahzrukhal’s started charging for listening time, too. Five caps for half an hour on the radio. The ghouls pay, though. They pay because they want to know.

Despite what he thinks, he listens. The liberation of the Lincoln Memorial. The slain Behemoth near the GNR. Big Town. Talon Company, gunning for their heads on a silver platter. The rumours that they may be working for the Regulators.

Tenpenny Tower.

 _Tenpenny Tower_.

Charon knows Roy Phillips. He’s had the unfortunate opportunity to meet the man. He’s a crooked bastard that’s near feral; that girl of his is, too. That Michael fella isn’t so bad, but…

Three-Dog keeps talking about Tenpenny Tower. The twins, apparently, have made their way there.

Ever since that little tidbit of news, it seems like the Underworld is clutching their pearls. Holding their breaths.

And then… and then the twins come back.

* * *

The girl is wearing a mask over her face, but it doesn’t change the fact that everyone can see the Yao Guai claw marks across her face. The boy remains unblemished.

He’s hovering about his sister when Charon sees them walk into Carol’s, and when the boy stumbles— _stumbles—_ into the Ninth Circle and demands for three bottles of whiskey, Ahzrukhal laughs and sells it to him for half the price.

The boy’s eyes are wide and _scared_ , but most of all, the boy looks… _guilty_. He sways on his weakened knees, and he all but falls in front of Charon, barely catching himself as he grabs onto Charon’s armour, holding himself up. The bottles of whiskey clank in his arm like wind chimes.

“Sorry,” He breathes, looking at where his hand was on Charon, like he didn’t mean to, and that he is well and truly— “Sorry.”

And then he’s gone.

The patrons of the Ninth Circle watches him go, and Charon…

* * *

Ahzrukhal talks as if each word that comes out of his mouth has been dipped in acidic poison.

When ghouls come in slow, far and few in between, he sits behind that counter, polishing it until it gleamed, and he’d talk to Charon. Charon is honour-bound to keep his secrets, to look away from the closet that’s teeming with skeletons. He never speaks out of turn; he never speaks unless Ahzrukhal commands him to reply.

But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to gag and choke at each word that Ahzrukhal tells him.

He is… a deeply disturbed man. That, on top of him being an evil fucking bastard makes Charon’s skin sizzle with more than decay.

“That boy,” He says, wistful like Willow with the girl, but with far less innocence than what Willow had exuded, “red would look good on him.”

Charon doesn’t speak. He already knows what it means.

* * *

Charon is coming back from collecting debts when he sees the girl, broad-shouldered and _giant_ , sitting beside Willow, the two of them sharing a cigarette. It’s been months since he last saw her and her brother, but her twin is nowhere to be found, and a pang of fear clamps itself around Charon’s spine.

Is the boy—?

“Hey, Ron!”

The girl snorts and passes Willow the cigarette. She whispers Willow’s nickname for him under her breath, the scars on her mouth and cheek moving as she smiles. Like this, she looks nothing like her twin, she’s battle-worn and ugly in a way that only the Wasteland can do.

Charon figures that the boy is okay; if he wasn’t, then his sister wouldn’t be sitting here, shoulder-to-shoulder with Willow, sharing a cigarette as if she doesn’t care about rotten, flaked skin on the filter of her fag. She wipes at her nose and they look at each other.

“Eris was telling me about the,” Willow makes a motion at her face, “scars.”

He doesn’t know what compells him to come towards the two girls; maybe the need to know if her brother is okay is partly to blame. Maybe because he itches for a cigarette, and here they are, sharing one as if they’d done it their whole lives.

Three-Dog says they came from a Vault. Vault 101.

This girl doesn’t look like she came from a Vault, and neither does her brother. But there’s a manic energy in her dark eyes that tell Charon that she’s scared of this world. This _new_ world. Charon doesn’t remember ever finding the Wasteland to be a thing of fear; he belongs here, after all, was made to live in this world.

Willow shoulders on. “They found Rockopolis! You know, from the—the radio show,” she nudges at the girl to make her validate the information, and the girl laughs, indulging Willow, nodding along.

She rasps, “It was near a Yao Guai cave, so,” The girl shrugs and scratches her fingers lightly on the deep, serrated scars on her face. She looks different and yet the same than from when he’d initially seen her.

“We accidentally. Or, well." Her face twists as she tries to grasp at her own story, as if she didn't particularly remember, or didn't want to. "Not  _accidentally_... went in the Yao Guai cave. See, Jo, he’s…” A smile. Fond yet pained. “I think in some other life, he’d be a vet. Or a teacher. He loved teaching little kids. Says it's the closest he can get to puppies. We had a cat, once. God knows where it came from.”

Willow furrows her eyebrows. “Vet?”

Charon looks at her. _Veteran?_ he thinks.

The girl only smiles and looks like she’s surprised that they don’t know what a ‘vet’ is. “That's what you took from what I said?" She laughs, full and deep. "Yeah. Veterinarian? Doctor for animals?”

Willow makes a sound of surprise at this, “That’s a _thing_?”

The smile only grows. She leans back on an arm and takes the cigarette back from Willow, placing it between her lips without much preamble. She stares up into the quickly darkening sky above the Museum of History, blowing a smoke ring to join the clouds.

“For cows—pre-war brahmin—dogs, cats… you know.” She coughs behind a fist, waving the cigarette at Charon, who just stares at it blankly. He doesn’t take it.

“No, I don’t,” Willow seems deeply entranced at the girl telling her story, her knowledge of things that Charon barely remembers, and knowledge that Willow doesn’t know.

The girl grins indulgently, her eyes a soft shade of dark green as she looks at Willow, who blinks as if surprised. Like she’s unused to someone looking at her that way. “I’ll tell you all about it, then,” she says, and then turns her gaze right back up at Charon, who feels as if he’s intruding on something he shouldn’t. Her grins turns teasing, unfamiliar to Charon, “And _I…_ will see you later, _Ron_.”

Charon feels the _want_ to drag his knuckles on the top of her head.

He turns on his heel and stalks back towards Underworld, leaving the two girls back out front, their voices carrying until the lumbering croak of the doors that lead into Underworld close behind him. He’s sure they can take care of themselves, and he’s sure they know that if he can hear their voices, then the Super Mutants that reside just across the Museum of History do, too.

The Ninth Circle is _busy_ when he enters. Music is spilling from the lone radio, and the ghouls are bustling. Funnily and surprisingly enough, the boy and Ahzrukhal are caught in a dance, something quick and dirty, and Ahzrukhal looks for all the world as if he’s just found someone’s cap stash. Charon’s never seen that big a grin on the man’s face before.

Ahzrukhal greets Charon, peeling himself away from the boy, “You’re back!” He crows, making a beeline for Charon.

The boy huffs as he’s suddenly without company, though ghouls bustle around him, indulging them with a beautiful smile, laughing when some of the ghouls run their leathery fingers through his long hair, and in this moment, Charon feels as if the Ninth Circle _isn’t_ the Ninth Circle.

Charon frowns and inches his body away from his employer, not liking the fact that Ahzrukhal is approaching him with such quickness in his movements. Usually, quick, jerky movements means that he’s high on Jet and wants to try and beat on Charon, or—

He lifts his lip up in a snarl.

“No need for that, _dog_ ,” Charon belatedly thinks how different Ahzrukhal and the girl says the word _dog_. He says it like it’s a title meant for the most inferior of beings, and she says it like… like someone who likes dogs.

“Hey, hey,” The boy comes over, in one hand a bottle of half-finished whiskey and the other pressing against Ahzrukhal’s chest to push him back. “None of that, now. We’re having fun, aren’t we, Ahzrukhal?”

He beams, and Charon is almost blinded by it, green eyes light and so different from his sister’s.

Ahzrukhal heels underneath the boy’s smile like the dog he accuses Charon to be.

“Have a drink, Charon,” The boy turns that blinding smile at him, and Charon shifts in unease, making the boy’s eyebrows lift in quiet askance. “It’s on me.”

And then he’s whisking Ahzrukhal away, still smiling at Charon.

Charon stands, quiet as death, his shotgun strapped to his back, blood money sitting heavily on a pack by his hip, someone’s guts and blood still sticking onto the bottom of his boot. He _is_ the Ninth Circle, untainted by the joy and brightness this Lone Wanderer brings.

* * *

The girl enters the Ninth Circle with Willow, Tulip, Greta, and Carol in tow. She’s grinning, her hands deep inside her pocket, and her brother comes up to her, asking her to dance, and then there they are, wisps of dark smoke on the dank, dirty floors of the Ninth Circle.

Ahzrukhal’s mouth is down turned at the sight of Greta and Carol.

But still, the siblings dance. They’re graceful, a carbon copy of each other yet not, and Charon can see why and _how_ the whole of Underworld loves them, but distrust still outweighs awe. He’s been living in this world long enough to know that it’s the pretty ones you have to watch out for.

When they part, suddenly, Carol is in the girl’s arms and Greta is in the boy’s, and Carol lets out a laugh that’s truly _beautiful_ , sweet like her, and Ahzrukhal’s frown deepens, as the girl effortlessly twists and dips Carol. Greta seems to not be too happy with the predicament, but the boy distracts her, leading her with care.

The ghouls clap at the display, in tune to the beat that spills out of the radio.

Charon can see Ahzrukhal’s fist curl tightly.

But before he can move, the song finishes, and there’s a pause, letting the dancers separate from each other.

He saunters over to Charon, breathing shallowly. One hand stretches out, unblemished unlike his sister’s, who is watching them with curious eyes and a small, encouraging smile.

“Dance with me,” He says.

Charon takes it. _No, he’d commanded it._

“You’re my new employer.” He says as he places his hand high on the boy’s back, what with him standing short of Charon’s chin. The boy hums and lets Charon’s hand wrap around his smaller one, soft in his palm. Unfamiliar. “You purchased my contract from Ahzrukhal?” It would make sense, since Greta is still alive and decidedly not dead due to Ahzrukhal’s envy and greed.

The boy hums again and they sway to Billie Holiday.

“Then I am no longer in his service…” Something churns in his stomach. His fingers itch. The boy is a warm body against his, soft and grounding Charon to _this_ sudden and abrupt change in his life, and he looks up to Ahzrukhal, who is glaring at him with a ferocity that Charon would once flinch at, but now, he feels… only sheer anger.

Violence shudders underneath his skin, and he squeezes at the boy’s hip, to which the boy takes in stride, leaning up to whisper into his ear. “You do what you gotta do, big guy.”

The girl is smoking a cigarette, leaning against the door with Greta and Carol at her side. She winks at him when he looks, tipping her head and returning to her conversation with the two women. Looking away. Giving permission.

Charon breathes.

He _breathes_.

He removes his hand from the warmth that is the boy in his arms, walks towards Ahzrukhal, who looks up at him with a wicked sneer. “Charon,” he greets.

“Ahzrukhal. He purchased my contract?”

“Two thousand caps in full.” A slow, sticky smile. “And then some. Aren’t you a lucky boy?”

“I see.” A pause. Even now, with Charon behind the counter that protected Ahzrukhal and his worldly possessions, he sneers up at Charon like he’s nothing but dirt. And that may be, but Charon isn’t the one who’s going to die on his polished, too-shiny counters.

Ahzrukhal tips his head to the side and stares at Charon mockingly, as if he still held power over him. If Charon was a smiling man, he’d grin.

But he isn’t.

“Have you come to say goodbye?” The twins are dancing again, and it should feel morbid, satirically so, but Charon feels as if it’s some kind of beautiful. Only Greta and Carol are here, now, and their eyes are on the siblings, watching them like children waiting to touch a snow globe.

Charon didn’t even notice the other ghouls having been ushered out.

“Yes.”

His shotgun sings in his hands, and the room doesn’t dare look his way when he shoots Ahzrukhal in the chest, and then pop his goddamned head open like a balloon.

That small part of him, the one not named Charon, laughs hysterically as Ahzrukhal falls.  

Charon straightens.

The radio plays on, and the twins dance.

 _“Maybe…”_ The Ink Spots croon, “ _you’ll ask me to come back again…”_

Blood sludges down his armour, and Greta whisks by him, plucking up one of Ahzrukhal’s coveted bottles of moonshine from someplace named _Point Lookout,_ pouring five shot glasses of the swill. She grins at him, tips the glass at his direction, and tosses it back.

“God,” She says with disdain, “I thought he’d never die. Good party, though.”

“ _But maybe… I’ll say maybe._ ”

* * *

A few months later, Eris will share a cigarette with Charon by the fire, underneath the dull lights of the Capital Wasteland, Jo’s head on his lap as he sleeps, and she’ll look at them both with dark eyes, a small smile on her face, no new scars on her body, and say, “I’m glad to have you on board, skipper.”

And Charon will blow a cloud of smoke at her face, make her laugh, the noise deep and sincere, and Charon will wonder if this is what it feels like to have a sister, to have a family.

From Jo’s Pip-boy, a man will lament about rain and tears, and quietly, Charon will start to sing.

**Author's Note:**

> this stemmed from my want to have a female lone wanderer that fits the "gentle giant" trope. jo came directly from my want and need of a lone wanderer that's tiny and in dire need of a character arc. also, male lone wanderer/charon is one of The Best pairings. fuck rare pair hell


End file.
